[Skunk]

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" has an inherent flaw. If my neighbor is beating his wife and I know about it (let's say I can hear them fighting and I see the bruises on her) then not only is it a crime to fail to report this activity it is a moral failure on my part. I am no better than the abusive neighbor; in fact, I would be just as bad as he for allowing the beating to continue when I could help stop it.

That's an interesting analogy - by a quirk of fate, I've seen the same one before, but used slightly differently. But before I quote it, let me first say this.

In my own opinion, the United States war on Iraq was unavoidable because the US was set upon removing what it perceived to be a threat to its security and interests, both in the middle east and at home. There was nothing that the international community (or indeed the Iraqi government) could do to prevent the conflict. The threat to US security was seen to be real and the belief in Washington was that Saddam could never be trusted (not without justification).

**It had nothing to do with weapons of mass destructions, helping the 'oppressed people of Iraq' or profit. Those are merely additional secondary benefits of the action.**

However, the *rest of the world* (and by this I mean the majority of the population, rather than merely the governments of various regimes are far more cynical (esp. in the ME).

Anyway, back to the wife-beating analogy as posed in the Saudi based Arab News:
"Take the apparently unobjectionable statement that, by opposing a US invasion of Iraq, you are effectively supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps it is better to explore this by way of an analogy. Suppose you know of a family who live on a farm. You know for a fact that the husband is a brute who rapes his wife and regularly beats his children. You also know of a notoriously unscrupulous multinational corporation, which wants to purchase the farm and use any means necessary to get rid of the brute. It is using the excuse of “liberating” the mother and children to achieve those ends.

Suppose further that, under pressure from the community, the husband has allowed the social worker into his house, and denies the presence of a belt on the premises. The social worker has not been able to get his hands on the belt. Perhaps the husband has hidden it. Perhaps the social worker, a pusillanimous individual, has simply overlooked it. In any case, you are not satisfied that things do not return to normal as soon as the social worker goes home.

Do you therefore help further the ends of the immoral multinational in order to bring the suffering of the beaten wife and abused children to an end? If you say yes, you do so in the knowledge that such an organization can only cause suffering in other ways, as the vehicle for exploitation there and elsewhere.

But if you say no, you are in effect saying that you accept that this poor woman and her children could be black and blue for the rest of their lives. That is not an easy thing for any decent person to live with...

...In the end, perhaps turning a blind eye would have been the moral thing to do. After all, many beaten women, despite everything, keep on loving the brute who beats them, as do their children. Ultimately, it is their choice, and to go knowingly against their wishes by jumping on the back of the multi-national corporation, which pretends to be helping them only to get their land, is really only to sink further into the moral quagmire."

[ 04-05-2003, 10:40 AM: Message edited by: Skunk ]